The opportunity of Digitalization reaches enterprises of all sizes to speed up the interaction with external stakeholders. The expectation of customers is to get an immediate response 24×7. To make those reactions possible it’s not enough to speed-up the sales machinery: We need to rethink the whole organization. Every part of the process chain could be on the critical path to delay the whole reaction time.

In finance organizations the expectations are even higher. It’s not only about the reaction time but also about rethinking and rebuilding old structures to move finance even further into a partner of the business; supporting strategic decisions and allowing new business models based on a vision but still substantiated with clear and accurate data.

Finance Operations is not always in the spotlight but irreplaceable in every business. Mostly it acts behind the scenes and still plays a vitally important role in ensuring the enterprises’ success.

It’s obvious that processes needs to be accelerated and automated. Efficiency must be increased to enable the CFO to take a more strategic role and build the business models for the future of the enterprise.

Sounds like a huge hurdle, but the tools we have today were science fiction only a few years ago:

The smartphone for example takes a leading role in supporting private and business life’s. But what’s the secret of what makes a smartphone so powerful?

It is not a single capability, it’s the clever combination of many. To name some: Simple touch interface, big display, always connected, Geo-location, camera and smart apps which combine all these single capabilities to something exceptional. And every day new apps appear to change the world.

The same mechanism applies to other areas where the recipe makes the difference and offers exponentially more than the sum of the ingredients:

It’s the same for an award winning chef de cuisine who combines the different ingredients to a unique experience of enjoyment;

The smart combination of the right innovations makes the world’s best finance operations solutions unique and powerful, and sets the foundation for new ideas of tomorrow:

Analytics are not only easy to use but based on real-time data, perspectives can be adjusted with some fingertips by the users themselves.

Sensors create tons of data which can be analyzed with in-memory technology which brings new insights we could only dream about a few years ago. As an example Smart Buildings support the facility management to create predictive maintenance plans before a breakdown occurs moving the needle from a reactive to a pro-active approach.

A few other ingredients are online-connection to customers and suppliers with help of the world’s largest business network or super-fast roll-out of solutions over the cloud.

But again, it’s the combination of all the ingredients which makes this offering unique.

And there are new trends like robotics and machine learning coming up, changing the near future of businesses. We are already working on the innovations of the future, the ingredients of enabling these solutions with new capabilities. The equation remains valid and can be extended: Adding new ingredients to the right platform makes the difference of a long term strategy.